Harpsichord Music Separated by a Century

Mahan Esfahani and Stefan Jackiw (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s concert)

Last night Herbst Theatre saw the beginning of this season’s PIVOT series of concerts presented by San Francisco Performances. The subtitle of this series is New Adventures in the Performing Arts, and the objective is to explore new approaches to both making music and presenting it. The theme of this season’s series is String Theory; and, taken as a whole, the series amounts to a journey through different approaches to music from string instruments. Last night offered a duo recital by harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and violinist Stefan Jackiw. They will be followed tonight by a “hybrid” trio bringing violinist Jennifer Koh together with Vijay Iyer on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. Saturday will feature the Telegraph Quartet of violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw performing with vocalist Theo Bleckmann and pianist Dan Tepfer; and the series will conclude, as it began, with a duo recital, this time bringing violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja together with cellist Jay Campbell.

Last night’s program took a highly imaginative approach to the harpsichord repertoire. It consisted of two “pairings” of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The first coupled Johann Sebastian Bach with Czech composer Viktor Kalabis. The second paired Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, with the American Walter Piston.

Of these four composers Kalabis is probably the least familiar, not just to last night’s audience but through much, if not all, of the United States. He was born into a musical family, first learning about music through piano studies. However, the Nazi invasion made it impossible for him to study at a higher level; and he was put to work in an aircraft factory. Life under the Communists after the war was not much better, but he was still able to study at the Prague Conservatory and the Academy of Music. However, both he and his wife, the harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková, refused to join the Communist Party, meaning that the only work he could get was in the children’s music section of Prague Radio.

Nevertheless, he composed on his own time, putting much of his efforts into music that his wife could play. Last night Esfahani and Jackiw performed his Opus 28 sonata, which was composed in 1967. This was decidedly unique music that did not try to look back on the pre-Classical traditions of the harpsichord repertoire but also did not dwell on the “Czech rhetoric” of composers active at the end of the nineteenth century. The sonata was written jointly for both Růžičková and the violinist Josef Suk, who gave the premiere performance.

Each of the three movements is relatively brief with a nod to traditional structure fashioned on decidedly contemporary rhetoric. Esfahani observed that Kalabis received far more attention in Europe than he does on this continent. Given the engaging qualities of Opus 28, I would argue that those of us that are serious listeners in this country are definitely at a loss. Since so much of the Kalabis catalog involves the harpsichord, we can only hope that Esfahani will continue his advocacy of this composer.

Piston is at least more familiar by name. There are probably still many students out there that know him as the author of textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. He was educated at Harvard University and subsequently taught there for the better part of his life. During the interval between these two episodes he studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas in Paris.

As a composer he was known for a rhetoric that could best be described as “American vigor.” That vigor is very much on display in the 1945 three-movement sonatina he composed for violinist Alexander Schneider and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick. Like Piston, Kirkpatrick studied at Harvard and then went to Paris to study with Boulanger. However, he also studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska.

One “fun fact” is that, while Piston returned to Harvard, Kirkpatrick took up a professorship at Yale University. It was there that he undertook his intense studies of Domenico Scarlatti, eventually resulting in providing all of the keyboard sonatas with catalog numbers (known as Kirkpatrick numbers). Despite the rivalries of their respective universities, it was clear that Piston and Kirkpatrick had a highly productive working relationship when Piston was compositing his sonatina.

Last night’s eighteenth-century selections were a little less consistent. Interestingly enough, the sonatas of both father and son were in the key of B minor. However, Emanuel’s Wq 76 duo sonata was definitely one of the high points of the evening. The keyboard part was rich in dazzling diversity, and it is not difficult to imagine that it became a significant source of inspiration for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This sonata was one of a set of four composed in the 1760s when Emanuel was in service at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great. By this time the harpsichord was beginning to go out of fashion, and Emanuel himself divided his attention between that instrument and the rise of the fortepiano. (He composed a double concerto for both of these instruments.)

Wq 76 probably provided Esfahani with the best opportunity to unleash his keyboard technique at its most prodigious. Nevertheless, his partnership with Jackiw was never strained. While Emanuel did not stint on writing solo keyboard passages, he knew better than to relegate the violin to the background. As a result, taken as a whole, Wq 76 emerged as the primary source of fireworks for both of the performers.

Sebastian’s contribution, on the other hand, was BWV 1014, the first of a set of six duo sonatas composed during the end of his tenure at Cöthen between 1720 and 1723. Like much of the other music from this period, there is a good chance that the sonata was composed for its pedagogical value. However, as is well known, pedagogy for Bach involved rhetorical expressiveness, as well as technical precision.

Unfortunately, neither of these qualities shined particularly brightly last night. The primary problem was one of balance. While almost all of the thematic material alternates between the violin and the harpsichord, the harpsichord accounts were, more often than not, barely audible. It almost seemed as if the two performers had not yet had the opportunity to figure out how to listen to each other on the Herbst stage; and it took all four movements of BWV 1014 for them to adjust to each other. That hypothesis was affirmed with the encore performance of another sonata movement (which I think was taken from BWV 1018 in F minor), which conveyed a far more satisfying sense of balance than had been encountered at the beginning of the program.